No luck finding a safe place

FEMA, others can't relocate disabled man

Jan. 13, 2013

Glen Guadagno is shown in a hospital bed in his Monmouth Beach home Friday with his wife Geraldine Davenport. Superstorm Sandy left heavy damage to the home and left the paralyzed man moving to different facilities to accomodate his needs. / ASBURY PARK PRESS PHOTO BY THOMAS P. COSTELLO

Geraldine Davenport cries as she decribes the difficulties she has faced with FEMA and getting proper housing for her paralyzed husband Glen Guadagno. They are shown in their Monmouth Beach home Friday that was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy. / ASBURY PARK PRESS PHOTO BY THOMAS P. COSTELLO

INSIDE

Geraldine Davenport decribes the difficulties she has faced with FEMA and getting proper housing for her paralyzed husband Glen Guadagno. They are shown in their Monmouth Beach home Friday that was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy. / ASBURY PARK PRESS PHOTO BY THOMAS P. COSTELLO

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After a 72-day journey that has taken him from hospitals to a nursing home to federally provided hotel rooms, Glenn Guadagno is back to where he started: in his home ruined by superstorm Sandy.

Guadagno, 52, ailing and bedridden before the storm, is paralyzed from his lower chest down. For more than a year, he has suffered from pressure wounds that sometimes plague people with disabilities such as his. A former crane operator who went on to own his own Brooklyn-based construction company that his son now owns, Guadagno was injured on the job 32 years ago.

After his wife’s futile search for housing and what she calls the failure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help them, both Guadagno and his wife, Geraldine Davenport, said they felt there was no alternative but for him to go back home to Monmouth Beach. She hired an ambulance Thursday and had him moved out of the Sheraton in Eatontown where they had been staying.

The home has power and heat now, but no plumbing. He is on a specialized bed in the middle of his living room hooked up to monitors and an intravenous device while workers wearing paper suits and face mask raise dust in the home.

“Now I’m living in the middle of a construction zone,” he said Friday. “All the dust — it’s unsanitary.”

Davenport has been keeping records that lay out her complaint against the agency: more than 120 phone calls and 13 visits to the Disaster Recovery Center in Long Branch. Still no housing.

“Their number in on my speed dial,” she said.

It wasn’t until she contacted the Asbury Park Press this week and the Press in turn called FEMA to discuss their case that more intensive help arrived.

A spokesman for FEMA, Chris McKniff, said the agency works extensively with people like Guadagno to find housing with the help of community groups, state and local authorities and volunteer agencies.

“It’s a little more challenging to find available resources for people with disabilities,” he said.

But the responsibility for finding housing ultimately falls on the individual, he said.

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Guadagno — no relation to Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno — is in a bind. According to the couple, most hotels cannot accommodate his massive bed. The hospitals will not keep him long because insurance will not pay. And the nursing homes are not equipped to deal with someone with Guadagno’s disabilities, they say.

A big man, when Guadagno gets moved, he gets injured, Davenport said. Either old pressure wounds get reopened or wounds that are healing get re-injured. He has battled life-threatening infections as a result.

“Glenn is sick now because he’s been moved so much,” she said.

Davenport said she is thankful for the hotel room she is now living in. And FEMA has given her thousands in rental assistance money. But as for helping them find housing, the agency have fallen flat, she said.

She is at wit’s end. She broke down Friday standing next to her husband as one of his monitors beeped, indicating a problem. Something was leaking.

A nurse was soon on hand to help him.

McKniff was reluctant to discuss the prospects of placing Guadagno, Davenport and their two adult children who ordinarily live with them in one of the eight or so handicapped-accessible apartments at nearby Fort Monmouth, which are due to be ready in the coming weeks.

He cannot discuss individual cases because of privacy concerns, he said.

After a call from the Asbury Park Press, FEMA contacted the Red Cross, which sent representatives to Davenport’s hotel room Thursday. But the Red Cross cannot provide what the couple most needs: an accessible temporary home, Davenport said.

After another inquiry from the newspaper Friday, Davenport received a flood of calls from FEMA, and even got a call from someone at the governor’s office Friday, she said.

Davenport Thursday was anxious about whether the Transitional Sheltering Assistance program would be extended, allowing them to stay at the Sheraton. But it was her husband’s need for a specialized bed that led her to send him home.

FEMA in a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning announced the TSA program was extended by two weeks.

The late-in-the-game notice by FEMA has cost the couple before. The hotel they first moved into had given away their room before FEMA announced an extension to the program in December.

Davenport said an official from an aid organization told her FEMA waits until the last minute to announce extensions of the TSA program to drive people out of the program, an allegation that McKniff denied.

Asked if his organization has received other similar complaints, Joe Young, executive director of Disability Rights New Jersey, a nonprofit group advocating for the disabled, said “surprisingly not.”

His group, funded by the federal government, has a memorandum of understanding with FEMA to report complaints to them and try to work them out, he said.